From the course: Compositing Text and Video in After Effects

Designing and animating text - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Compositing Text and Video in After Effects

Start my 1-month free trial

Designing and animating text

- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to design and animate the titles using basic key frames and some parenting. So this is what we have so far. We are working on the second layer which is a combination of shot two and shot three. And now I'm going to attend to those two layers of text. I want to create the animation and the design in a separate environment, so I'm going to select both of those layers and I'm going to go to the layer menu and I'm going to choose pre-compose. I'm going to name this comp title dash at work after the second line that we have over here, and I'm going to move all the attributes into the new composition as well as adjust the composition duration and also let's open up the new composition. So all of those three options should be turned on. I'm going to click okay now. And first I'm going to switch my work space to the text layer. This way I can select the text and work on it more easily. I'm also going to hold down the alt or option key and click once in order to show the title safe grid. And then I'm going to select the first line over here, and, for what it's worth, I'm still using the same fonts, so Merriweather. You can get this font if you like to via typekit service. So I'm going to select the first line over here and I'm going to change the size of it to 95 pixels. I'm going to select the second line over here, and I'm going to change its size to 140. I'm going to move down the second line and then I'm going to select both of them together and I'm going to change the kerning from metric to optical. This will create a better version of it in terms of legibility and kerning. Alright so what I want to do now is create some sort of motion to the first line and then connect them both together using a null object which will create a parenting animation for both layers together. And this will create a very interesting effect as if one layer is pulling the other one when it moves. So let's begin with the first one. I'm going to hold down the alt and shift key and press P in order to create a position key frame as well as expose it here on the time line. And then I'm going to go all the way to the end over here. And I'm going to highlight only the x value over here. Make sure that I'm placing my cursor at the edge of it and then I'm going to subtract 30 pixels. This way after effects is going to do the math for me and create a very easy going motion of 30 pixels just for the first layer. And then I'm going to go to the layer menu and under new, I'm going to add a null object which is a dummy object that doesn't render inside After Effects. But it is great in order to help us control other layers. So I'm going to right click over here because I'm missing the relevant column which is the parent and link, this way I can make sure that it is there. And then I'm going to close this triangle, select both of those layers and use the pick whip in order to point it to this null object. Now I'm going to repeat the same thing that I did before. So I'm going to hold down the alt and shift key and press P in order to create a key frame over here at this point. Then going all the way to the end and I'm going to use the same mechanism. So negative or minus 30 pixels for the x value alone. And now I'm going to go to the beginning and press space bar. You can see that we have some sort of a secondary motion. We have this movement of one layer, and it looks like it is pulling the other one with it. A small touch, but I think this will work very nice here. So this is it for this one. This is how you can design the titles and highlight part of the message using different scale values and also add interesting motion using parenting.

Contents